Russian President Vladimir Putin has come out in support of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two enclaves that are seeking to separate themselves from Georgia and become independent states.

I am against it foursquare, and not just because an ex-KGB mogul is for it. I feel a little like the Baptist deacon in the oft-told story, who objected to the purchase of a chandelier: “In the first place, nobody can play it; in the second place, nobody can pronounce it; and in the third place, what this church really needs is more light.”

In my opinion, Georgia should be allowed to keep those enclaves, along with all its other hard-to-pronounce places, including Taliaferro, Coweta and Alapaha. But then I’m told that I’m confusing the Georgia that Sherman marched through with the Georgia that Stalin sprang from — the one that lies precariously where Europe meets Asia, and nobody is sure which one it belongs to.

Anyhow, Abkhasia and South Ossetia have their quarrels with the Georgian government in Tbilisi. I’m not sure what those quarrels are, but they surely have nothing to do with the difficulty of pronouncing “Tbilisi.” The capital of South Ossetia is Tskhinvali, “also spelled ‘Cchinvali’ or ‘Cxinval,’” according to the Wikipedia Encyclopedia, which is the one I use when I don’t have time to consult something more substantial. (The capital of Abkhasia is Sukhumi. I’ll leave it to you to figure out the pronunciation.)

Allowing these two wide places in the pigpath to become countries would be destabilizing. We already have enough trouble pronouncing “Iraq,” and it’s only two syllables. The president and most people who have been there tend to pronounce it “Eye-Rack,” which could mean “a rack where eyes are stored” or “the rack between the “H” rack and the “J” rack.” I prefer “ir-ROCK,” pronouncing the first syllable the way you pronounce the first syllable in “irregular.” That enables me to use the hoary pun, “between Iraq and a hard place,” which is where the president now finds himself.

It isn’t easy absorbing those foreign names into Dixie English. Osama bin Laden was kind enough to pick one of the most pronounceable names in the Middle East. But I’m still trying to figure out whether the flake who runs Libya is “Qadaffi,” “Guadaffi” or “Gawdawful,” though I lean toward the last.

The Eurasian Georgia is less than half the size of the American Georgia, which has 159 counties, the average size being comparable to that of a Midwestern cowpasture. I surmise, then, that neither South Assetia nor Abkhazia would dwarf Sullivan County in size or population.

I have a special reason for opposing independence for those two areas. When I’m having trouble dropping off to sleep, I use a memory exercise that is often more effective than Ambien. I recite the independent countries of the world in alphabetical order. When I first started doing this, there were just over 150 of them, so it wasn’t too hard to line them up and march them through my mind. But as the world has broken up into tinier and tiny fragments, the number of independent states has grown to 195, if you count Taiwan as independent, which it is in reality. The latest newcomer is Kosovo, which is a micro-morsel of Serbia, which was formerly the bully of Yugoslavia, which now has gone the way of the Yugo, its namesake automobile.

Before that, my memory had to absorb East Timor, aka Timor Leste, which broke away from Indonesia, which adopted it after the Portuguese left and treated it like a stepchild.

If you think memorizing 195 countries in alphabetical order is easy, just try it. It gets hard when you come to the Koreas. Do you list them under “K” for “Korea, North” and “Korea South”? Or  under “S” and “N” respectively, the way we list the Carolinas and the Dakotas.

And do we list “East Timor” under “E” for “East” or under “T” for “Timor Leste.”

It’s the kind of dilemma that can keep you awake at nights.

It has taken me about 20 years to get them in order, because I usually fall asleep about the time I come to the Maldives and am in dreamless slumber long before I reach Zimbabwe.

If all the countries were as simple as Afghanistan, Bahamas, Canada and Denmark, it wouldn’t be so bad. But over the years, the map has accumulated Palau, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan,  and Kiribati which, unaccountably, pronounces it’s name as though it were spelled “Kiribass.”

Kiribati is a peculiar country. It consists of 30 or so islands with a total land area about 40 percent as large as Montgomery County, but they’re scattered over a stretch of the Pacific about two-thirds the size of the United States. I find it altogether more appealing that Nauru, an independent country just a square mile larger than Alexandria, Va., with an economy based on fossilized bird poop known as guano.

Well, at least Abkhazia and South Ossetia occupy contiguous clumps of land. But if I had to be stranded somewhere, I’d much prefer Kiribati, with Nauru ranking well ahead of the Georgian breakaway regions and well behind Taliaferro (pronounced “Tolliver”) County in Georgia way down in Dixie.

It would be awfully tough getting lost in South Ossetia and asking the guy behind the register at the Exxon station, “Do you know the way to Tskhinvali?”

Readers may write Gene Owens at 317 Braeburn Drive, Anderson, S.C. 29621, or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@aol.com.